Korea Series #1: TACP Enfeebled

Abstract: This article provides a big-picture overview of the state of TACP and close air support before and during the beginning of the Korean War. While this topic isn’t the most fun, it is necessary to understand the dismal state of TACP before and during the war. I apologize if it’s boring, but I can’t do a series on TACP in Korea without laying out the conditions leading to the war.

 

             Post-WWII CAS Environment

            The post-WWII environment was not conducive to advancing military strategy or tactics, nor was it conducive to maintaining the level of joint effectiveness enjoyed by the US military throughout the war.  It’s easy to understand why this was the case, and two points are particularly relevant to TACP. The Army was downsized from an 8,000,000-man force to less than 700,000 in less than two years, and the Air Force was on the doorstep of independence based on the argument that strategic bombing was the ultimate factor in wartime victory. The Army Air Forces had no case for this argument, save for the atomic bomb.

            These two factors – the downsizing of the Army and the rise to supremacy of the Air Force based on the preeminence of the big bomb – led to a military-industrial environment that hyper focused on nuclear strategy. Additionally, the new Department of Defense (formerly the Department of War) sought funding for advancing technologies relevant to only the Air Force and Naval aviation. The prevailing military theory of the time was that the next war would be nuclear, and ground troops might be irrelevant in the next fight. As most leaders saw it, Air Force included, if the next wars were to be fought with little or no ground troops, there was no point in training, funding, and equipping the close air support mission. Had the nuclear bomb not entered the picture, it is possible that the proponents of tactical air power (and there were many) would have won their case, leaving behind a DoD that prioritized capitalizing on the WWII advancements in the air-ground relationship.

            Nonetheless, General Pete Quesada, the first commander of the Tactical Air Command, had successfully fought to force the Air Force to promise that it would continue to fund, train, and equip necessary close air support assets to the Army.[1] General Tooey Spaatz, the USAF’s first chief of staff, had genuinely believed in the value of joint warfighting during WWII, but had more so believed in the promise that the Air Force was the way of the future. He thought that the Army should not control any air assets and that if anyone would provide close air support, it would be his Air Force. As such, Spaatz and his staff promised the Army that the USAF would provide CAS in future fights. Quesada sought to fulfill the promise by influencing the rewrite of FM 31-35 which renamed the Air Support Party the Tactical Air Control Party, executing CAS demonstrations and exercises, and by moving the TAC headquarters from Tampa, Florida to Langley, Virginia to be next door to the Army Ground Forces Headquarters. While Quesada wasn’t exactly in the best spot to facilitate the advancement of CAS TTPs and training, he did his best to breathe some life into the mission despite adversarial circumstances. 

            Such was the case, until General Hoyt Vandenberg took the helm from Spaatz as the first full-term Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Vandenberg, an opponent of tactical air power and proponent of strategic bombing despite having been the 9^th Air Force Commander during the height of WWII, immediately relegated Quesada’s TAC from a major command to an administrative command. Vandenberg stripped TAC of all of its aircraft, leaving it intact in name only. Realizing that his fight for TAC relevance was essentially over, Quesada asked for reassignment to retire in peace. Of the three numbered Tactical Air Command commanders during WWII, only General Otto P. Weyland remained.

Two years after the Air Force’s founding, it lost its most CAS and joint warfighting-experienced commander, relegated tactical missions to the sidelines, and completely disregarded joint training and doctrine maintenance. Furthermore, the Air Force failed to maintain an aircraft that could perform the CAS mission, focusing on fast-moving jets that could intercept nuclear bombers. For the next year, the Air Force kept minimal TACP manning, comprised mostly of radio operators and a few disgruntled pilots sent to the 605^th Tactical Control Squadron at Pope AFB[2] as punishment and provided them with minimal training.[3] In the five short years after WWII, the Air Force had almost completely lost its capability to deliver CAS to the Army.    

 

 

 

Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, the first full-term Air Force Chief of Staff, was a politician above all else. Although commanded the 9^th Air Force (the tactical air force responsible for interdiction and close air support), he distanced himself from tactical airpower so he would “not appear too friendly to the Army.”

 

Korean War Kicks Off

            When North Korea invaded the South on June 25^th, 1950, the USAF and Army found themselves totally unprepared to fight a conventional war. Unpreparedness was quickly exposed when the Army sent its first troops into combat to defend the Osan area on July 5^th. The 540-man Task Force Smith, deprived of close air support and anti-tank weaponry, faced a 5,000-man North Korean force, including an armored battalion. The North Koreans inflicted 150 casualties and quickly overran the Task Force Smith position. It’s worth pointing out the damage that could have been inflicted upon the North Koreans had Task Force Smith employed the exact same Rover Joe tactics as WWII, let alone had they further improved upon CAS technology and TTPs in the five-year interim between the wars.

            Meanwhile, the USAF rushed its few TACPs to attach themselves to the front line units. TACP from the 605^th TCS imbedded with the 21^st Infantry Regiment, 24^th Infantry Division, and 1^st Cavalry Division to stabilize the front lines. Many problems plagued this initial wave of TACP and their aligned units, disabling them from any form of effectiveness. The only aircraft available for CAS during the first month of the war were the F-80C and F-84, both platforms not designed for nor whose pilots had trained for the close air support mission.   

 

 

 

The F-84 was not designed and not ideal for close air support, but its pilots eventually found ways to make it effective. It became the most effective fighter-bomber in the war (though still not ideal), while the F-80 and F-86 could barely perform CAS at all.

 

            More importantly, there was little to no joint communications at the strategic or operational levels of command. FM 31-35 dictated that the Joint Force Commander furnish a Joint Operations Center (JOC) comprised of representatives in each branch to run the fight, similar to the WWII setup for the 9^th Air Force/12^th Army Group relationships. Scaled down in Korea, the Korean JOC should have closely mirrored the Field Army/Tactical Air Command setup enjoyed by the Quesada/Hodges and Weyland/Patton partnerships from WWII. After all, the official doctrine was published because of the success of that system.

            There was effectively no Joint Operations Center at any level during the first two months of the war. General Ridgeway, the deputy commander of Far East Command (FEC), had furnished a command center, but failed to include TAC leadership. In any case, the Air Force had hardly maintained a combat-capable TAC to support joint operations. General Stratemeyer’s Far East Air Force’s (FEAF) attempted to set up a JOC in accordance with FM 31-35 in July 1950. Still, Stratemeyer could not convince Generals Ridgeway or MacArthur to furnish it with Army personnel. In effect, the Army was trying to fight its own fight while the Air Force attempted to help without any knowledge or tools on how to do so.[4] In a desperate attempt to provide a semblance of close air support to the front lines, TAC provided airborne FACs flying T-6s beginning on July 10^th to assist the meager TACPs sent to the front lines. The T-6s flew with the callsign “Mosquito” and kept that callsign for the rest of the war.[5]

 

 

 

The T-6 was an effective FAC(A) platform and resulted in the proliferation of FAC(A)s in the Korean War. They began with the callsign “Mosquito” and it stuck. Specific sorties would add an additional callsign to delineate between flights, such as “Mosquito Mellow” or “Mosquito Lightning.”

 

 

            The result of a practically non-existent JOC, an enfeebled peacetime Tactical Air Command, poorly trained and equipped TACP, directly resulted in the U.N. forces’ defeat on the battlefield from June through August. Task Force Smith was overrun at the Battle of Osan (July 5^th), the 21^st Infantry Regiment was defeated at the battle of Chochiwon (July 10-12), the 24^th Infantry Division was not only defeated during the Battle of Taejon (July 14-21) but also got its commanding officer[6] captured, and the 1^st Cavalry Division failed to hold its ground at the Battle of Yongdon (July 22-25). This series of embarrassing defeats came from an essentially third world North Korean military, albeit equipped with Soviet weaponry, concluding with the near expulsion of US/UN forces from the Korean Peninsula. Thankfully, the US front lines stabilized around the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, giving the joint force time to rediscover how to fight a conventional war using air-ground tactics similar to WWII.   

 

            Editorial Section 

            Does this sound familiar? The post-WWII attitude included an Air Force that acted like it would never perform CAS again and disregarded its Army counterpart, except for a select few believers in tactical airpower. The Army failed to maintain its relevance and couldn’t imagine fighting the next war without the plethora of close air support they enjoyed in the previous war. I would argue that we saw that same mindset occur between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, between Vietnam and the First Gulf War, again before OEF/OIF, and we are seeing it yet again in the post GWOT era. In Korea, the doctrine was on paper, but in practicality, the USAF and Army had foregone technology development, TTP maintenance, and training proficiency to support the doctrine.

By now TACP (and the CAS mission as a whole) has reached the peak of its name recognition. Yet, the USAF still wants to drastically reduce the funding and training necessary to maintain exceptional levels of close air support. It seems that however much the Air Force wants to separate itself from the Army, it constantly finds itself in a wartime scenario where it has to rediscover close air support at the outset of hostilities. Had the USAF and Army maintained even a mediocre semblance of CAS/joint TTP proficiency in the WWII/Korea interim, US forces most likely would have dominated the North Koreans in 1950 before the Chinese intervened. The promise that “the war will be over before Christmas 1950” would most likely have come true. Yet, here I am, writing about an Air Force that forgot how to do close air support.

Are we headed back down that path in the 2020s, just like they did in the late 50s, the 80s, and the mid-late 90s, even though CAS was the USAF’s most flown mission set in Korea, Vietnam, and the GWOT? Probably, but there is a saving grace. I believe that TACP has reached a sort of tipping point in which it won’t forget how to integrate with the Army counterpart, and the career field won’t magically forget how to perform close air support. Although the big Air Force seems to be again abandoning close air support, I think TACP may be a saving grace in the next war when the USAF is suddenly again forced to fly more CAS than any other mission, even if the tools (aircraft) aren’t designed for excellent CAS. Unless, of course, TACP is forced into a new mission set that it was never designed for, pulling the career field away from Army integration and into a USAF unilateral mission set. 

Conclusion 

Although the picture was dismal going into the Korean War, especially during the first few months. TACP and CAS as a whole, were both enfeebled to the point that they were terribly ill-prepared to execute going into the Korean War. They weren't alone. Most of the DoD was unprepared, and it showed in the first few months. Thankfully, the situation dramatically improved at Pusan. The next article will cover the defense of the Pusan Perimeter, where all stops were pulled to revive close air support, resulting in a WWII-style blitz of North Korea.